Mosaic (web browser)

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, Usenet, and Gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public. Mosaic was also the first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window.

Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) beginning in late 1992. NCSA released the browser in 1993, and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997. However, it can still be downloaded from NCSA.

Mosaic was the final link in the chain of technologies (TCP, IP, ftp | nntp | gopher | http, URL, HTML, etc.) which Tim Berners-Lee had earlier brought together to invent the World Wide Web. After the appearance of Mosaic the concept of the World Wide Web took off globally at an explosive rate.

ViolaWWW

Viola WWW, first developed in the early 1990s, was the first popular WWW web browser (though to a limited audience) which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web.Gillies and Cailliau in How the Web was Born offer an extensive history of the development of Viola. Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, who at the time was a student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Created in 1992, it was the first browser to use authoring technology such as embedded script able objects, style sheets, and tables. According to Gilles and Cailliau "Viola was to become the first X-browser to make any impact, but even his early versions went down well at CERN...As this Viola WWW developed, it was to set the standard for everything to follow it." Ed Kroll also highlighted it in his popular 1992 text, Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for table less web design).

Link rot

Link rot (or linkrot) is the process by which links on a website gradually become irrelevant or broken as time goes on, because websites that they link to disappear, change their content or redirect to new locations.

The phrase also describes the effects of failing to update web pages so that they become out-of-date, containing information that is old and useless, and that clutters up search engine results.

Detecting link rot for a given URL is difficult using automated methods. If a URL is accessed and returns back an HTTP 200 (OK) response, it may be considered accessible, but the contents of the page may have changed and may no longer be relevant. Some web servers also return a soft 404, a page returned with a 200 (OK) response (instead of a 404) that indicates the URL is no longer accessible. Bar-Yossef et al. (2004) developed a heuristic for automatically discovering soft 404s.

C (programming language)

In computing, C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system.Although C was designed for writing architecturally independent system software,it is also widely used for developing application software.

Worldwide, C is the first or second most popular language in terms of number of developer positions or publicly available code. It is widely used on many different software platforms, and there are few computer architectures for which a C compiler does not exist. C has greatly influenced many other popular programming languages, most notably C++, which originally began as an extension to C, and Java and C# which borrow C lexical conventions and ope.

NeXTdimension

NeXTdimension (ND) was an accelerated 32 bit color board manufactured and sold by NeXT from 1990 that gave the NeXTcube color capabilities with PostScript. The NuBus card was a full size card for the NeXTcube, filling one of four slots, another one being filled with the main board itself. The NeXTdimension featured S-Video input and output, RGB output, an Intel i860 64 bit RISC processor at 33MHz for Postscript acceleration, 8-32MB RAM main memory and 4MB VRAM for a resolution of 1120*832 at 24 bit color plus 8 bit alpha channel. An onboard C-Cube CL550 chip for MJPEG video compression was announced, but never shipped. A handful of engineering prototypes for the MJPEG daughterboard exist, but none actually function.

A stripped down Mach kernel was used as the operating system for the card. Due to the supporting processor 32 bit color Display PostScript on the NeXTdimension was faster than 2 bit grayscale Display PostScript on the NeXTcube. Since the main board always included the grayscale video logic, adding a NeXTdimension allowed the simultaneous use of two monitors. List price for a NeXTdimension sold as an add-on to the NeXTcube was $US 3,995.

Netscape Navigator

Netscape Navigator and Netscape are the names for the proprietary web browser popular in the 1990s, and the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation, and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share. Yet by 2002 its users had almost disappeared, partly because of Microsoft's bundling (inclusion) of its Internet Explorer web browser software with the Windows operating system software (both Microsoft products), and partly because Netscape corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation after the late 1990s.

The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein, the Court ruled that Microsoft corporation's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was monopolistic, an illegal business practice.